Dr. Carlo Bava told The Associated Press by phone that Morano’s caretaker had called him to say she had stopped breathing in the afternoon while sitting in an armchair at her home in Verbania, a town on Italy’s Lake Maggiore.

Inform/screenshot

Bava said he had last seen his patient on Friday when “she thanked me and held my hand,” as she did every time he called on her. While Morano had been increasingly spending more time sleeping and less time speaking in recent weeks, she had still eaten her daily raw egg and biscuits that day, he said.

A woman in Jamaica, Violet Brown, who was born in that Caribbean island on March 10, 1900, is now considered the oldest known person in the world, according to a list kept by the Gerontology Research Group. Jamaican Prime Minister Andrew Holness tweeted his congratulations to her.

Morano’s doctor, who lives a few blocks away from his patient, had been her physician for nearly a quarter of a century.

Morano, born on Nov. 29, 1899, had been living in a tidy, one-room apartment, where she was kept company by her caregiver and two elderly nieces.

He said she had been her usual chatterbox self until a few weeks ago. Since then it was clear, “she was slowly fading away,” and spending nearly all day in bed, Bava said.

Last fall on her birthday, Morano declared: “I’m happy I have turned 117!”

Bava has previously told the AP that Morano lost a son to crib death when he was six months old.

Morano left her husband in 1938 because he would beat her. She “abandoned the husband in the Fascist era, when women were supposed to be very submissive,” Bava said in a 2015 interview. “She was always very decisive.”

Inform/screenshot

Morano began working in a factory making jute bags when she was 16. Then she worked at a hotel, working way beyond the usual retirement age.

Beside work, she enjoyed herself. She was considered a good dancer with a beautiful singing voice in her youth.